Bert Stratton

Finding a Good Plumber Is a Heavy Lift

Bill Poland, 83, is one of the few I know who answer the phone. Lakewood, Ohio A good plumber, who can find? Mine, Bill Poland, is 83. He won’t do fourth-floor work anymore. In one of the apartment buildings I own, he’ll go only to the third floor…

Strike up the (klezmer) bands for Ukraine: Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- There’s that bar scene in “Fiddler on the Roof,” where Ukrainians and Jews drink and dance together. That happens in Cleveland in real life. At a holiday party, a 15-woman choir, dressed in Ukrainian folkloric regalia,…

Who’ll Win the Baby Name Game?

My wife is pushing our pregnant daughter to name the baby Cecil. My daughter is pregnant and wants to talk about baby names. I’m reluctant. My parents never advised me on what to name my kids or how to raise them. My wife and friends all say I should…

We Are All Ukrainians Now

American Jews find the present changes our view of the past. Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania. They’re all the same to many American Jews. I’ve never heard an American Jew boast about his Ukrainian heritage. (One of my grandfathers was from…

Holocaust Remembrance at Café Europa

Everyone in the audience had an astonishing story. Cleveland I played clarinet last month at Café Europa, a Holocaust survivors’ daytime drop-in program. Some of the audience talked during my show, but who has the nerve to tell Holocaust survivors to…

My Deadbeat Tenant Insisted on Eviction

Lakewood, Ohio I went to my first eviction hearing in two years last week. I hadn’t evicted anybody, or lost any rents, during Covid. The neighborhood social-services agency had given out rent vouchers to six delinquent tenants of mine. The tenant in…

A Viking Cruise for Old English Majors

Old Poets: Reminiscences & Opinions, by Donald Hall (Godine, 296 pp., $27.95) In Old Poets, the late poet Donald Hall opines on everything literary (“I suspect that Emily Dickinson, bipolar like most poets, was as eccentric as Marianne Moore”), and…

Never Throw Away Santa Claus

Lakewood, Ohio I got in trouble for throwing out Santa. He was in a storage locker in the basement of one of my apartment buildings. I thought he was junk. I didn’t know he was a “vintage Avon Santa on bicycle ornament from my grandmother,” but that…

Hey, where’s my lake? Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights want to make a lake disappear down the block from me. Completely vanish the lake. Horseshoe Lake straddles the Cleveland Heights-Shaker Heights line. What if the mayor in your…

My Father Became His Own Boss

My dad, Toby, hit tennis balls with me after work. He would say: “Racquet back. Hit it now!” He would repeat that for minutes on end. He wore Bermudas and Jack Purcells, and sometimes no shirt. This was appropriate court attire in the 1960s, at least…

California or Bust

“People do not go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. They go to offices, quarrel with their wives, and eat cabbage soup,” wrote Anton Chekhov. I was just out of college and living at home; my mother had a bridge game scheduled for the next day.…

Cleveland Drops the Ball

‘Cleveland is a city that has been ravaged by financiers and industrialists . . . its population abandoned to their fate, left to freeze their ass off, standing in the dirty winter slush, waiting for a bus that is a long time coming. Somehow they go…

I’m Cruising Through My 70s With Tennis

My tennis buddies sound like middle schoolers when they talk about age differences. A year, plus or minus, is a big deal. “When’s your birthday, Bert?” I’m 71. “Wow, you’re just a baby!” I’m a baby if you’re 73. Each additional year of wear and tear…

Guat’s Not to Like?

I just got back from a vacation to Guatemala. A friend in Cleveland said, “Seems like more people are leaving there, than going.” Definitely. “Guat’s up?” is a T-shirt slogan in the tchotchke shops down there, and very few people are buying. The…

The gigs disappeared. Now it’s all just talk: Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- On a podcast, the keyboard player talked about his love of oat milk. The guitarist raved for 10 minutes about hiking. Musicians aren’t performing much due to COVID-19, but they are talking a lot. I’ve been a bandleader for…

Rescue Horseshoe Lake. Dam it: Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Lake Erie is a just a blob on a map to many Greater Clevelanders. Some of my neighbors in the Heights make the six-mile pilgrimage north, along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, once a year to stare at the lake for a couple…

Hanging in There

The federal moratorium on evictions ends March 31—maybe. The government keeps pushing the date back. I’ve been in eviction court at least 100 times over the years. I always wear a tie to court. Usually the tenant doesn’t. Advantage, me. Occasionally…

“Stayin’ Alive,” or the COVID-19-shot hustle: Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- I sat in front of a shelf of red wines and got my COVID-19 shot. I got my shot last week at the Discount Drug Mart in Slavic Village. I’m still waiting for the Cleveland Clinic to call me. I appreciate the “little guy” --…

Some Acts of God Are Better Than Others

Lakewood, Ohio An enormous oak fell onto one of the apartment buildings I own. There was no water damage or burst pipes at the building. That was the beautiful part. Also, nobody was hurt. Eighteen windows were knocked out, plus there was extensive…

Leaf blowers at 50 feet and other painful sounds of the season: Bert Stratton

CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Mark Zuckerberg wants half of Facebook employees to eventually work from home. Here’s the thing about working from home: It can drive you slightly batty. You start thinking about noise, particularly when the leaf blowers…